Graphics card choice

Going to need about 550 dollars at least to upgrade everything :/ not going to have that money for while probably

fafhrd wrote:Speaking of debugging FPS issues, I've noticed that my FPS seems to be absolutely stellar for the last 10% of LK, after you get ressed. Whether it's 10 or 25, once I accept that res, I seem to cruise along at a smooth 60ish fps.

This is surprising, since as far as I know, everyone is attacking the boss - yet before that phase I get around 15-20 fps.

The only real difference I can think of is that for the final 10%, no one is healing. I'm not sure what about no heals going off would lead to that big a performance difference for me though - I'm not a healer so I don't have any healing specific mods installed, and I believe I've disabled every available option in my unitframes and grid for showing incoming heals, so I don't think stuff like lib-healcomms should be processing heals very much.

Does anyone else find their performance jumping up after being ressed for the final 10% of the LK fight?

This happens on both my hunter and warrior, even though they have only some mods in common.

You probably have mods that show incoming heals on your raid frames, or you're running Healbot or some such. While that's extremely important information to see, all that information being passed around does impact your performance.

Mods that interact with one another, such as Healbot telling another Healbot how much healing is being done to whom, often use hidden whispers that are extremely inefficient.

So yes, it is entirely possible that healing is killing your frame rates.

Koatanga wrote:

fafhrd wrote:Speaking of debugging FPS issues, I've noticed that my FPS seems to be absolutely stellar for the last 10% of LK, after you get ressed. Whether it's 10 or 25, once I accept that res, I seem to cruise along at a smooth 60ish fps.

This is surprising, since as far as I know, everyone is attacking the boss - yet before that phase I get around 15-20 fps.

The only real difference I can think of is that for the final 10%, no one is healing. I'm not sure what about no heals going off would lead to that big a performance difference for me though - I'm not a healer so I don't have any healing specific mods installed, and I believe I've disabled every available option in my unitframes and grid for showing incoming heals, so I don't think stuff like lib-healcomms should be processing heals very much.

Does anyone else find their performance jumping up after being ressed for the final 10% of the LK fight?

This happens on both my hunter and warrior, even though they have only some mods in common.

You probably have mods that show incoming heals on your raid frames, or you're running Healbot or some such. While that's extremely important information to see, all that information being passed around does impact your performance.

Mods that interact with one another, such as Healbot telling another Healbot how much healing is being done to whom, often use hidden whispers that are extremely inefficient.

So yes, it is entirely possible that healing is killing your frame rates.

Like I said, I've specifically disabled any display of incoming heals. Now, I don't know how good Grid and AgUF are at actually disabling parsing of incoming lib-healcomms messages when the feature is disabled, but I have done everything short of editing the mods myself to disable them. And no I'm not running Healbot, although just about everyone in the world using Grid or the popular unitframes mods are running lib-healcomms as an embedded library, so if that were the issue, I'd expect more people would have noticed the same jump in performance as me. I would guess most people haven't even disabled the incoming heals features since they're usually on by default.

fafhrd wrote:

Koatanga wrote:

fafhrd wrote:and AgUF are at actually disabling parsing of incoming lib-healcomms messages when the feature is disabled, but I have done everything short of editing the mods myself to disable them.

Got a problem right there. Remove ag UF, and replace with Shadowed UF. It's pretty much identical, just even more settings you can toggle. And it's faster, and less buggy.

I was actually thinking of running part of tonight's raids with using default unitframes and no raidframes (usually grid) to see if those are at fault. Might give shadowed a try if that indicates a problem in the unitframes, thanks

Daeren wrote:The funny thing is that as I mentioned earlier, you won't notice anything above 2 cores since both WoW and SC2 are programmed for 2 cores atm (SC2 might get upgraded to utilize more cores)

WoW changed slightly and can utilise more than 2 cores now.

Daath wrote:

Thank you for the clarification. As I understand it, WoW essentially runs on 2 cores, the main thread on one and the rest of the smaller ones on another, correct? Considering that the bulk of the original wow was made before dual cores came out, it's understandable that the game would not be written to optimize for them.

Bulk on one core, other threads in as many cores as the OS wants to pass it thru. We have lots of threads.

Still more than 2 cores won't help much for wow but as said previously you will get an increase in performance if you are running multiple applications at the same time etc.

I recently went from a single core 3GhZ to an I3 something. Before unsurprisingly when ripping a CD in itunes wow went down to around 1 frame every 4 seconds, now with all my lovely cores I can play WoW in windowed mode + rip + have MSN with webcam up and they run decently.

Im lucky in that my core duo 2.4Ghz runs quite happily at 3.2Ghz (8x400fsb)

My GF recently upgraded her PC as her vid card died.
went from a GTS260 to a ati 5850, a card arguably 50% better at least.

And for wow at least she only got nominal framerate increases.
Her cpu is a X2 2.8Ghz Amd... so it seems wow is cpu limited for her pc.

I had nothing but problems with shadowed_UF, went back to my trusty Pitbull_3 =/

Also, booo UPS and Newegg. Bought a videocard that was supposed to arrive today but the shipment got delayed and will not arrive till tomorrow. >=/

Raided most of last night without:
- grid
- aguf
- my hud mod ("hud")

In general FPS seemed better when idling in the raid (~50-60 fps instead of the usual ~30-40), but as soon as combat started I was down to the usual 10-15 fps. Watching my readouts, GPU was never really past ~40-50% utilization at 1920x1080, 2xFSAA, but both CPU cores went up to around 90% utilization when in combat. Not sure how accurate those readouts are, but definitely seems to be more a CPU bottleneck than a GPU one.

Also my bar mod (Macaroon) seems to hurt FPS, since when I switch to Bartender to make sure my bite is usuable on Bloodqueen, I gain FPS too.

None of this helps answer why FPS goes up so much during LK sub10% though, unless it's just the spam of lib-healscomm messages affecting me even when I have no mods doing anything with them - if that were the case I'd imagine a lot of other people would notice it too though. I might try putting everyone in the raid on ignore one night to see what happens to FPS/CPU, since that supposedly stops the server sending me addon comms from them even on invisble addon channels.

LOL, I thought I was the only one that used Macaroon -- although I only use it to have a completely lazy one-button tanking rotation for when I'm feeling lazy and tanking heroics (or ICC trash) =P

Also, have you disabled core parking? This helps with cpu loads on W7 and is known to fix some issues with stuttering/spiky FPS.

No idea what core parking is or how to control it, so possibly not.

As for Macaroon, I only really use it because it lets me make arbitrary sets of buttons instead of wanting everything to be bars like all the other damn bar mods since Flexbar seem to insist on. Like I can make my barely visible 120 button bar at the bottom of my screen and stick everything on it, instead of having to make 10 individual bars of 12 buttons each with bartender and then position/scale them all and find a way to make their visibility linked. If I could find some other button mod that didn't insist on bars I'd probably gain performance, since I don't use 90% of the bells and whistles Macaroon supports.

http://ultimatecomputers.net/forum/view ... f=7&t=3644

Here is the link that explains what core parking is and how to disable it.

Klaudandus wrote:http://ultimatecomputers.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3644

Here is the link that explains what core parking is and how to disable it.

I'm running with just 2 cores though, which according to that article shouldn't be affected by core parking

There is another way then, inside the config.wtf file you can find several cvars. Part of the problem is that with the way dual core works, wow will run on one physical core and one virtual core. By tweaking the AffinityMask cvar and set it to '5', it will force wow to run on both physical cores instead.

I forgot to mention -- you do need to add that key at the end of the config.wtf file. In your case it would be Set ProcessAffinityMask "5"

A more detailed technical explanation is found here:
http://www.vindicatum.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=206